| |
| YOU were forever finding some new play. | |
| So when I saw you down on hands and knees | |
| In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay, | |
| Trying, I thought, to set it up on end, | |
| I went to show you how to make it stay, | 5 |
| If that was your idea, against the breeze, | |
| And, if you asked me, even help pretend | |
| To make it root again and grow afresh. | |
| But ’twas no make-believe with you to-day, | |
| Nor was the grass itself your real concern, | 10 |
| Though I found your hand full of wilted fern, | |
| Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover. | |
| ’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground | |
| The cutter-bar had just gone champing over | |
| (Miraculously without tasting flesh) | 15 |
| And left defenseless to the heat and light. | |
| You wanted to restore them to their right | |
| Of something interposed between their sight | |
| And too much world at once—could means be found. | |
| The way the nest-full every time we stirred | 20 |
| Stood up to us as to a mother-bird | |
| Whose coming home has been too long deferred, | |
| Made me ask would the mother-bird return | |
| And care for them in such a change of scene | |
| And might our meddling make her more afraid. | 25 |
| That was a thing we could not wait to learn. | |
| We saw the risk we took in doing good, | |
| But dared not spare to do the best we could | |
| Though harm should come of it; so built the screen | |
| You had begun, and gave them back their shade. | 30 |
| All this to prove we cared. Why is there then | |
| No more to tell? We turned to other things. | |
| I haven’t any memory—have you?— | |
| Of ever coming to the place again | |
| To see if the birds lived the first night through, | 35 |
| And so at last to learn to use their wings. | |
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